The Shell Collector

Doerr, Anthony. The Shell Collector. New York: Scribner, 2002

A high school student once asked me, “So when is a story a ‘short story’ and when is it a ‘novel?’” I explained that it didn’t have to be either, that there were stories called ‘novelettes’ that fell somewhere in between and that lengths were arbitrary. I added that a ‘short story’ is a story that is short. No good. We finally agreed that a short story was one written to be read at one sitting and compared it to a movie which we watch all-at-once versus a series (like Downton Abbey) that we come back to a number of times. That seemed to satisfy students, but not me necessarily.

Anthony Doerr’s ‘short stories’ range from ten to thirty-five or so pages so at a modest reading speed of 300 words-per-minute, the shortest would take about twelve minutes to read; the longest about forty minutes. For slower readers—say 200 wpm, the range would be about eighteen minutes to around seventy.

So ‘short story’ fits.

Anthony Doerr’s books have fetched general acclaim and prestigious awards including the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for All the Light we Cannot See. I actually haven’t read any of his novels—yet—but About Grace is on the coffee table here at my daughter’s home in Panama, and will be my next read. Other novels by Doerr include Four Seasons in Rome and Memory Wall.

Reviewing a short story collection can become something akin to reviewing eight novels: what seems true about “The Shell Collector” needn’t be true about “July Fourth.” My choice is to talk a bit about one of Doerr’s stories, namely the last in the collection, “Mkondo.”

The plot follows a man by the name of Ward Beach who has been sent by a museum to Tanzania to collect a fossil of a rare, prehistoric bird-dinosaur. During his sojourn there, he meets Naima in the most bizarre of encounters; she’s running down the middle of a road so that he’s unable to pass her with his Land Rover. She finally stops, jumps onto the hood of his vehicle and says, “Keep driving, I want to feel the wind!”

Her wild energy captivates him and he begins to “court” her, driving over rough roads to the hut where she lives with her parents. But courting her isn’t easy; every time he visits, she challenges him to catch her and she takes off through paths in the forest with him in pursuit. She always outruns him; she’s too fast and there are too many trails criss-crossing. He goes on a fitness regime to the point where he can almost keep up with her until one day she leads him to the edge of a cliff where her footprints cease. Beach falls over the cliff and finds himself in a deep pool at the bottom where Naima awaits him. He asks her to marry him and she consents. It’s as if she wouldn’t have him until he proved himself able to take “the final step.”

But this is only background. This beautiful, wild creature doesn’t fare well in Ohio. Like a plant in a drought, she wilts from grief at the loss of the Africa she feels she’s left forever, the loss accentuated by the tamed grayness of Ohio. Finally, her despondency is so intense that Beach no longer tries to reach her, she no longer invites him to reach out to her.

Until she discovers photography, that is, a medium through which she reacquaints herself with clouds and skies, light and shadows to the point where she is obsessed with the possibility of reclaiming a world she’s left behind. Mastering the intricacies and excelling in the art she’s discovered gives Naima the courage she needs and she takes herself back to Tanzania and the house in which she grew up.

The story doesn’t end there, but as is typical of other stories in the collection, Doerr avoids the gratuitous supplying of meanings and outcomes, causes and effects, a skill that separates the seasoned storyteller from the amateur.

Doerr’s diction is highly accessible and evocative.

“The truck bounced over potholes, lilted into curves. Still she clung to the hood. Finally the road ended: there was a dense tangle of vines below a steep ravine at the bottom of which the rusting frame of a car lay mangled and bent. Ward opened his door; he was nearly hyperventilating (185-6).”

“Another year passed. He dreamed of her. He dreamed she’d sprouted huge and glorious butterfly wings and circled the globe with them, photographing volcanic clouds rising from a Hawaiian caldera, tufts of smoke from bombs dropped over Iraq, the warped, diaphanous sheets of auroras unfurling over Greenland (212).”

What is true of virtually all the stories in The Shell Collector is the uniqueness of the characters. Griselda is a gangly, six foot something high school volleyball player who marries a metal eater (he swallows razor blades, armours and is purported to have eaten—piece by piece—a Ford Ranger) as a touring show. And there’s Joseph Saleeby, an escapee from the brutal civil war in Liberia who takes a job as a caretaker of a millionaire’s summer home . . . and forgets to take care of it. The title story “The Shell Collector” is centered on a blind collector of shells—a former professor in his field—along the beaches and shallows of a marine park in the Lamu Archipelago in Kenya. The development of believable characters—especially the eccentric kind—is difficult without losing verisimilitude. Doerr amazes with his ability to create characters that live, and with an economy of brush strokes: a rare thing.

I’ve always been partial to short stories. I find most novels too long and you don’t come across many published novelettes anymore. As Anthony Doerr has demonstrated here, the short story genre is able to deliver all we expect when we eagerly pick up a book.